This is Xcavator 2025 (NES Cartridge), a fully functional NES title built from Oberth’s original design of the same name. First developed at Incredible Technologies Inc., the company behind coin-op classics like Golden Tee Golf, Big Buck Hunter, and more, Xcavator was shopped around to multiple publishers across the country way back in 1991, but it never found a home, and was quietly archived and never looked at again.

Recently, the prototype's source code was discovered and rebuilt by the Video Game History Foundation from Oberth's development archives, which were donated by his family after his unfortunate passing. Incredible Technologies then graciously agreed to donate the rights to the game to the VGHF to use as a fundraiser for its charitable work.

The Video Game History Foundation then worked with Mega Cat Studios to finish the game, staying true to Oberth’s original vision and using the tools and environments that Oberth would have utilized himself to make the game whole.

iam8bit took it from there, creating a truly unique and authentically retro package for Xcavator 2025 that includes a 14-page manual loaded with more info on Oberth and Xcavator, written by the fine folks of the VGHF themselves. It’s exhibit-quality stuff, available for your very own collection.

Best of all, 100% of the profits from the Xcavator 2025 NES Cartridge will go to fund the Video Game History Foundation, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization dedicated to preserving, celebrating, and teaching the history of video games.

This is a one-of-a-kind product made to support an important cause. Don’t miss your chance to be a part of video game history.

We know all about Trump, migration, the EU, Israel and all those international issues. But what crazy stupid thing is unique to the nutjobs in your country?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/40417187

The Murphy inquiry suggested bookmakers were grooming children with ads online, but Labor’s new social media ban on under-16s is viewed as a solution because it would, in principle, limit their exposure to such advertising online.

I have a wireguard VPN set up for a friend where they can remotely connect to access frigate and I can remotely connect to fix things when needed. They are considering switching to tmobile buisness as their ISP since spectrum is screwing them on price, tmobile's minimum is twice as fast as spectrum while still being a lower price, and AT&T can't be convinced their small business isnt a residential duplex or an apartment.

Tmobile offers the Inseego FX4100 gateway which does have an IP passthru option, so my question becomes will that work to wireguard in with their current router/firewall solution hosting the other end of that and just passing packets through the Inseego, or is that just not possible without tailscale due to CGNAT?

ChatGPT’s crawler GPTBot, which spiders the internet to capture information and turn it into knowledge, is the most-blocked bot on the internet, according to Cloudflare’s 2025 year in review. Meanwhile its biggest rival, Google, is the No. 1 most-allowed crawler. And perhaps even more interestingly, while ChatGPT is the most-blocked bot, it’s actually Anthropic’s Claude AI engine that is the least reciprocally beneficial service for website owners.

Every year internet infrastructure company Cloudflare publishes an analysis of what’s happening on the internet.

Archive: http://archive.today/xvW1Q

Cite: https://radar.cloudflare.com/year-in-review/2025

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/43763604

Archive link

European and Ukrainian leaders have officially launched an International Claims Commission in The Hague, marking a significant step toward accountability and reparations for the damage caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The new body is tasked with processing and adjudicating claims related to losses suffered by the Ukrainian state, businesses, and individuals since the start of the war.

The establishment of the Commission reflects growing international consensus that victims of the conflict should have access to a structured, legal mechanism to seek compensation. According to European officials, more than 80,000 claims have already been submitted, highlighting the vast scale of destruction to infrastructure, housing, industry, and livelihoods across Ukraine.

...

The International Claims Commission is designed to operate as an independent and rules-based mechanism. Its mandate includes reviewing evidence, assessing damages, and determining the validity and value of claims arising from the conflict. While it does not itself enforce payments, the Commission represents a crucial institutional framework that could underpin future compensation arrangements.

Locating the Commission in The Hague — a city internationally recognized as a center for justice and international law — underscores the legal and symbolic weight of the initiative. European leaders emphasized that the Commission complements existing international justice efforts and reinforces the principle that violations of international law carry consequences.

...

For Ukraine, the launch of the Commission represents an important diplomatic achievement and a step toward long-term recovery and reconstruction ... For Europe, the Commission sends a broader message: accountability and reparations are integral to any durable peace. By creating a formal mechanism now, European states aim to ensure that compensation is not treated as an afterthought, but as a core element of post-war justice laying the groundwork for future reparations and reinforcing the international rules-based order.

...

Family say Ahmed ‘doesn’t discriminate’ and would have done anything to save lives during the attack

Project 2026 is not destiny. It is a warning—and one we must answer with the full force of a movement that has never accepted a future written for us by someone else.

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/43764288

Web archive link

The Moscow City Court has upheld the sentence against Grigory Melkonyants, co-chair of the election rights advocacy movement Golos (“Vote”). Melkonyants was convicted of participating in the activities of an “undesirable” organization — namely, the European Network of Election Monitoring Organizations (ENEMO) ... In May 2025, the Basmanny District Court sentenced Melkonyants to five years in a general-security penal colony; his defense appealed the ruling.

At the appellate court hearing, Melkonyants delivered a final statement in which he criticized the work of the prosecutor’s office and the court, calling their approach to sentencing “careless.” [The statement can be read in the linked article.]

...

Diplomatic staff from the embassies of the U.S., France, the Czech Republic, Norway, Switzerland, Austria, and New Zealand, as well as a representative of the European Union, attended the announcement of Melkonyants’s sentence in May.

...

The European Commission unveiled a plan on Tuesday to drop the EU's effective ban on new combustion-engine cars from 2035 after pressure from the region's auto sector, marking the bloc's biggest retreat from its green policies in recent years.

The move, which still needs approval from EU governments and the European Parliament, would allow continued sales of some non-electric vehicles. Carmakers in regional industrial powerhouse Germany and in Italy had sought easing of the rules.

The EU executive appears to have bowed to calls from carmakers to keep selling plug-in hybrids and range extenders that burn fuel as they struggle to compete against Tesla, opens new tab and Chinese electric vehicle makers.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/13873

Talking Point: “Communism/socialism sounds good on paper, but it doesn’t work in the real world. It goes against human nature. It’s a nice theory that always fails in practice.”

Summary:

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This is perhaps the single-most common dismissal used by capitalists against socialist governments. This is repeated ubiquitously against across all capitalist and conservative sources as an Axiom. This aphorism appears in countless forms but rarely with specific attribution - it’s treated as received wisdom that needs no justification. The argument implies that:

1. The theory is internally consistent and appealing,
2. BUT human nature or practical realities make it impossible,
3. Every attempt has failed, proving it can’t work,
4. Advocates are naive idealists ignoring reality.

Variants:

• “Real communism has never been tried” (mockery of defenders)
• “It’s utopian thinking”
• “Sounds good, doesn’t work”
• “Nice idea, wrong species”
• “Human nature makes it impossible”
• “You can’t change human nature”

The rhetorical function allows the person making the argument seem reasonable (”I understand the appeal...”) while dismissing the actual counterpoint entirely. Positions capitalism as “realistic” and “practical” vs. socialism as “idealistic” and “theoretical.” It frames issue as settled empirical fact rather than debatable question and it functions as a thought-stopping cliché that ends discussion before it begins.

Sources:

• Pervasive across Cato Institute, Mises Institute, TPUSA, PragerU materials
• Repeated by Milton Friedman, Thomas Sowell, and other prominent conservatives
• Standard conservative talking point found in political discourse, social media, and casual conversation
• Hoover Institution: “The False Appeal of Socialism” (2020)
• Frequently cited without attribution as “common knowledge”

The genius (and weakness) of this argument is that it’s designed to be unattributable - it masquerades as universal wisdom rather than ideological propaganda.

Rebuttal

CAPITALISM DOESN’T EVEN WORK IN THEORY!

This argument is designed to masquerade as universal wisdom instead of an ideological propaganda. “It’s repeated everywhere precisely because it’s a thought-stopping cliché, not an actual analysis.” Everyone who makes this argument always advocate for another system: Capitalism.

It is meant to paint defenders of socialism and communism as idealists living in a utopian society while defenders of capitalism are painted as “realists” who understand the inner workings of the real world. However, nothing can be further from the truth.

While these anti-communists do concede to the fact that communism works in theory, they seem to forget that capitalism, doesn’t even work in theory, let alone in practice.

Why Capitalism Fails in Theory:

Contrary to popular belief, capitalism isn’t when people sell “things” or commodities, which is basically a thing of value that can be traded. Traditionally, people used money to buy commodities such as sugar or rice, and the majority would then consume most of it. However, around the 1600s something changed:industrialization. Commodities that were locally produced and sold, were now produced on a mass scale and sold non-locally in mass quantities. People who were already wealthy were able to use their money in order to trade for commodities in large quantities, not to use or acquire these commodities, but to resell it in order to acquire surplus value. Marx labeled this process the M-C-M’ cycle:

For example, if someone invests €100,000 to buy five cars and register them for ride-sharing services like Uber, the cars are not purchased for personal transportation, rather they are bought as capital. Drivers are hired to operated them. The cars are kept on the roads as much as possible. After a year, the entrepreneur has earned €160,000 in fares and commissions. This is the classic M–C–M′ cycle in modern form:

M (Money): €100,000 capital outlay

C (Commodity): Cars, app registrations, and labor time

M′ (More Money): €160,000 — the original sum plus surplus value extracted through the drivers’ work

The point isn’t that society gains more mobility — the cars’ use-value — but that money has returned to its owner augmented. The drivers’ labor and the vehicles’ wear are just the intermediaries through which money begets more money.

In Marx’s analysis, this raised a crucial question: where does that “more money” actually come from? It cannot come from the mere act of exchange, since every trade in a market swaps equivalents — €1,000 worth of goods for €1,000 in cash. The capitalist doesn’t create new value by buying and selling alone. To find the source of profit, Marx followed the chain backward and found it in the one place where something new is produced: the worker’s labor. The capitalist purchases labor power for less than the value it creates. The difference between what the worker is paid and the value their labor adds to the final product is the surplus value — and this, Marx argued, is where exploitation truly begins.

Which begets the first contradiction of capitalism: there’s only so much you can squeeze workers’ wages before the system begins to undermine itself. The more labor is exploited to maximize profit, the fewer people there are with the purchasing power to buy what capitalism produces. In other words, by impoverishing its own consumers, capital saws off the very branch it sits on. This creates a crisis of underconsumption. Capitalism ends up undermining its own market base.

The second way capitalism fails theoretically is that if there are multiple firms that produce the same commodity, each firm must expand their output to flush the competition out of business. But, when all the firms end up doing that simultaneously, the market becomes saturated and the price of the goods drop exponentially. This leads to periodic cycles of bankruptcies, layoffs and and boom and bust cycles. Many of which, we have witnessed in our lifetimes (depending on our age).

During these recurring crises, weaker firms collapse while stronger ones buy up their competitors. This process leads to the consolidation of ownership — both horizontally, when companies absorb rivals within the same industry, and vertically, when they expand control up and down the supply chain. Over time, this turns competitive markets into a handful of monopolies and cartels, exactly as Lenin described in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. What begins as a system of competition ends as a hierarchy of concentrated power.

As Lenin demonstrated in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, by 1907 just 0.9% of German enterprises controlled over half of all industrial workers and the majority of total output. What Marx had theorized as the concentration of capital had already become measurable reality.

Unfortunately, the contradictions and pitfalls don’t end there. As a handful of cartels and monopolies dominate production, their need for profit and raw materials grows insatiable. To keep their factories running and capital expanding, they must look beyond their own borders. Hence begins the drive to colonize the world — to seize new territories, control resources, and secure cheap labor. To keep their factories running and profits rising, they expand outward —colonizing the world. Colonialism reconfigured entire societies for extraction: in India, the British East India Company replaced food crops with tea, opium, and indigo; in Cuba, only sugar could be grown; in Rwanda, fertile farmland was seized for industrial coffee under German and Belgian rule. The result was the same everywhere — famine, dependence, and the destruction of local industry. Colonies that had once fed themselves were forced to import basic food from the imperial core, enriching the same corporations that had robbed them.

As Lenin explained in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, German enterprises entered the colonial race late. By the early 20th century, Britain and France had already divided most of the globe into their own spheres of exploitation. To secure access to raw materials and markets essential for its survival, German capital had only one option left — to seize colonies by force. Thus, imperial rivalry transformed into military conflict, culminating in the First World War: a struggle not of nations, but of capitalist powers fighting over a world that had already been divided.

Capitalism Fails in Practice

When the First World War ended, the map of empire changed, but its logic remained. The victors didn’t simply punish Germany for aggression — they neutralized an economic competitor. The Treaty of Versailles makes perfect sense when viewed through the lens of capitalist rivalry, not morality. France and Britain sought to permanently weaken Germany’s industrial base, which by 1914 had already surpassed both in steel production, chemical research, and machine manufacturing.

By stripping Germany of its colonies, restricting its military, seizing patents, and imposing astronomical reparations, the Allies ensured that German capital could not re-enter global markets as an equal competitor. Versailles wasn’t about peace; it was about market control. It froze the world’s hierarchy of production — guaranteeing that France and Britain would continue extracting from their colonies while German capital was deliberately handicapped.

Treaty of Versailles as Explained by a Satirical Cartoon of the time

The tragedy of Weimar Germany was not that fascism overpowered democracy, but that centrism surrendered to it. The ruling class, terrified of socialism and unwilling to sacrifice profits, preferred to dismantle democracy rather than risk redistribution. By the early 1930s, parliament had already hollowed itself out through emergency decrees, wage cuts, and deference to capital. Hitler did not overthrow the system; he inherited it.

As I wrote in The Economy of Evil, fascism did not emerge from chaos or irrationality. It was a rational response of a ruling class cornered by its own contradictions. When capitalism could no longer rule by consent, it ruled by coercion. Fascism became the mechanism through which industrialists preserved their property, destroyed unions, and restructured production under the guise of national renewal.

Parenti called it “capitalism in extremis” — the system defending itself with violence when ideology and markets fail. What began as economic crisis under Hindenburg and Brüning matured into political extermination under Hitler. Capital’s contradictions had finally produced their ultimate form: a state that openly fuses corporate, military, and nationalist power to annihilate class opposition.

In the end, the familiar refrain that “communism works only in theory but fails in practice” collapses under scrutiny, because capitalism has failed on both counts. Its theoretical foundations — competition, equilibrium, self-regulation — implode the moment they are practiced. Each stage of capitalist “progress” has revealed a deeper contradiction: the wage squeeze that undermines consumption, the overproduction that destroys markets, the imperial expansion that breeds world wars, and finally, the fascist synthesis that fuses capital with the state. These are not accidents of mismanagement but the logical outcomes of a system that can sustain itself only through crisis, conquest, and coercion. History’s lesson is not that communism failed to live up to its ideals — it is that capitalism inevitably lives down to its own.

Check out all the other arguments as I build the talking points:

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From Historic.ly via This RSS Feed.

stop hiding where are you nerd

hey nerds! i got a lovely email from GitHub this morning that their increasingly vibe-coded, barely-working Actions features are about to get more expensive (charging by the minute for something that notoriously spin-locks is a special flavor of shit sandwich).

i usually just use whatever i’m given at wherever i’m working. i do have a project that i maintain to parse Ollama Modelfiles tho: https://github.com/covercash2/modelfile and to be honest, Actions is the only solution i’ve ever used that came close to sparking joy, simply because it was easy to use and had tons of community mind-share (i’ve definitely heard horror stories and would never stake my business on it), but this price increase and all the other news around GitHub lately has got me side-eying self-hosting solutions for my git projects. Forgejo seems like the way to go for git hosting, but Actions in particular Just Works™️ for me, so i’m kind of dreading setting something up that will be yet another time sink/rabbit hole (just in time for the holidays! 🙃).

i can install most of my tooling with my language toolchain (read: rustup and cargo) which makes things fairly neat, but i just don’t have a sense for what people use outside of Jenkins and Actions.

i thought this community might have some insight beyond the LLM generated listicles that have blighted modern search results.

thanks in advance 🙏

Archive link

European and Ukrainian leaders have officially launched an International Claims Commission in The Hague, marking a significant step toward accountability and reparations for the damage caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The new body is tasked with processing and adjudicating claims related to losses suffered by the Ukrainian state, businesses, and individuals since the start of the war.

The establishment of the Commission reflects growing international consensus that victims of the conflict should have access to a structured, legal mechanism to seek compensation. According to European officials, more than 80,000 claims have already been submitted, highlighting the vast scale of destruction to infrastructure, housing, industry, and livelihoods across Ukraine.

...

The International Claims Commission is designed to operate as an independent and rules-based mechanism. Its mandate includes reviewing evidence, assessing damages, and determining the validity and value of claims arising from the conflict. While it does not itself enforce payments, the Commission represents a crucial institutional framework that could underpin future compensation arrangements.

Locating the Commission in The Hague — a city internationally recognized as a center for justice and international law — underscores the legal and symbolic weight of the initiative. European leaders emphasized that the Commission complements existing international justice efforts and reinforces the principle that violations of international law carry consequences.

...

For Ukraine, the launch of the Commission represents an important diplomatic achievement and a step toward long-term recovery and reconstruction ... For Europe, the Commission sends a broader message: accountability and reparations are integral to any durable peace. By creating a formal mechanism now, European states aim to ensure that compensation is not treated as an afterthought, but as a core element of post-war justice laying the groundwork for future reparations and reinforcing the international rules-based order.

...

First they killed their chef, now they used Kenyan black magic to juj Rob Reiner's son to kill him!

https://archive.is/zPIB2

• The European Union plans to expand its Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism to some assembled goods such as cars and washing machines to help close loopholes.
• The EU introduced CBAM to safeguard its industry during an ambitious shift to net zero by 2050 and prompt other parts of the world to make their output greener.
• The EU will propose measures to extend the levy to selected steel and aluminium-intensive downstream products, and will also unveil a proposal on how to support its own exporters via a new fund.

...

The European Union plans to expand an incoming emissions charge on imported goods as part of efforts to strengthen a flagship climate policy that’s aimed at protecting the bloc’s industries during the green shift.

The EU has pressed ahead with its Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism — which covers six emissions-intensive sectors — despite criticism from trading partners from the US to China. On Wednesday, it plans to propose measures to extend the levy to some assembled goods such as cars and washing machines to help close loopholes, according to a draft.

...

The EU introduced CBAM to safeguard its industry during an ambitious shift to net zero by 2050 and prompt other parts of the world to make their output greener. The idea is that carbon-intensive sectors forced to comply with the bloc’s world-leading climate laws won’t face unfair competition from producers operating in nations with weaker rules. It comes amid concerns that Europe is deindustrializing under the strain of high energy prices and the green transition.

“The overall objective of the legislative proposal is to strengthen the effectiveness of CBAM, thus reducing greenhouse gas emissions and fighting climate change globally,” the EU says in the draft proposal, which is still subject to change. “This proposal will extend the scope of CBAM to selected steel and aluminium-intensive downstream products.”

...

As of January this year, dozens of carbon-trading systems were in force globally, covering almost a fifth of global emissions, according to a report by non-profit organization IETA. Under EU rules, the fee importers will need to pay could be at least partially waived if a carbon levy has already been paid in the country where the goods were produced.

“The CBAM is deeply unpopular among major exporters to the EU, but it has already proven to be effective in pushing reticent countries toward building or expanding carbon-pricing efforts,” said Henry Lush, a carbon analyst at consultants Veyt.

...

The European Commission on Wednesday will also unveil a proposal on how to support its own exporters via a new fund filled with a quarter of the proceeds collected from the levy over the next two years, according to a draft seen by Bloomberg. In addition, it will present detailed rules on calculating fees that importers will have to pay at the border, and measures to prevent circumvention.

The fees companies will have to pay will largely depend on the so-called default values, which will effectively set a price list for emissions when importers can’t provide verified, installation-specific data at the border, according to Robert Jeszke, head of Poland’s emissions management authority.

“In the early years, the most immediate behavioral effect is likely to be improved monitoring and verified reporting, rather than instant deep decarbonization across the board,” he said. “But CBAM’s financial materiality will rise over time.”

...

All over the world, democratic socialism failed in the face of ascendant fascism as “socialists” allied with bourgeois republics. The many millions of dead call to us from beyond the grave to not repeat this mistake.